You may not consider it a “killer app” but one thing restricting Linux deployment in enterprises is an implementation of Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD.) However, AD for Linux is on its way in Samba version 4 and is sure to annhilate a barrier to Linux adoption in business.

I was going ask you for your take on what will be this year’s marketing trend to boost sales. We have seen things like green computing and virtualization and the ever popular security (pick your favorite subtopic – USB data slurping, laptop encryption, firewalls etc), or whether Linux is for smart people but I was talking with a couple of friends, both technical and end user and ended up shaking my head.

Whenever a person or business is thinking of migrating away from Microsoft Windows to Linux, or to FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, or some other FOSS operating system, the two most important considerations are:

1. Take the long view. The idea is to build a sustainable, future-proof computing infrastructure.
2. It all starts with the operating system. Sure, there are a lot of wonderful FOSS applications that run on Windows, such as OpenOffice, Firefox, Audacity, Pidgin, Thunderbird, Gimp, and many more. But that doesn’t address the fundamental flaws of the Windows OS; it’s like using more and better dung polish.

Taking the Long View
Windows is the lamprey eel of operating systems. Lampreys are parasites with toothed, funnel-like sucking mouths. They attach themselves to bigger fish and live off their blood. Eventually the host fish weakens and dies, and then the lamprey finds another victim.

The 5K layoff at Microsoft will look like a paper cut compared to the hemorrhaging that will take place if some of those lucrative government contracts were lost to Linux and Open Source applications. Remember…

For almost every Microsoft and Windows machine that gets axed, there will be an anti virus company somewhere crying a river of tears as well.

This anti-Linux Microsoft “ad” hit the Web a few weeks ago, but I just came across it last night and thought it was funny.

It’s not funny because of its content but rather because some people actually think that it’s a real ad put out by Microsoft to discredit Linux, one originally placed on a page describing how to multiboot operating systems.

Nearly a year ago we reported on two new games coming to Linux: Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor. These games were developed by Frozenbyte, a relatively unheard of Finnish game studio, and both are third person shooters with a sci-fi setting.

Cloud computing from the likes of Google and Amazon has become quite the rage in the last few years. Nick Carr’s The Big Switch and other works have pointed toward a future of “utility” computing where we’ll all use hosted apps and storage, thanks to the “scale” provided by big back-end companies and their giant hardware and software farms. But, there also has been pushback. Most notable among the nay-sayers is Richard M. Stallman, who calls it “worse than stupidity” and “a trap”.

Sorry, Windows users, Boxee is only for Macintosh or Linux computers. You can download it from www.boxee.tv. There is also a version for Apple TV boxes, but Apple doesn’t support such software, so if it causes problems you’re on your own.

As the bad economic news continues to accumulate, Linux offers hope to cash-strapped businesses everywhere. That’s why bMighty has put together a uniquely useful set of how-to guides that can help you choose which Linux distro is right for your company’s needs, show you exactly how to make the move, and even point you to the best places to get free Linux help.

Over the past week, bMighty open source blogger Matthew McKenzie has written a series of amazing articles that tell you pretty much everything you need to know to help your company make the most of the open source operating system.

Windows Compatibility

Last month VirtualBox 2.1 was released with several interesting changes and among them was support for OpenGL. With this latest open-source virtualization software from Sun Microsystems, it became possible to run some OpenGL programs within a guest virtual machine while allowing the host system’s graphics card to accelerate the drawing. All the modifications that are needed by the guest operating systems is to just install a VirtualBox OpenGL driver. What was missing, however, was support for the Direct3D API, but that is now emerging within the VirtualBox camp.

What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Various bug fixes for Internet Explorer 7.
– Many crypt32 improvements, including new export wizard.
– Better support for windowless Richedit.
– Improvements to the print dialog.
– Many fixes to the regression tests on Windows.
– Various bug fixes.

KDE

A new “Crystal Desktop Search” Plasmoid, allowing searching through NEPOMUK indexes (and MediaWiki-based websites). Support for “grep-like behaviour” in the “FileWatcher” Plasma applet, and support for custom server addresses (aka. backend locations) for the “Pastebin” applet. Further developments in the “System Load Viewer” (which moves to kdereview for KDE 4.3) and “Video Player” applets.

The Dutch NLnet Foundation, aiming to stimulate open network research and development and more general to promote the exchange of electronic information, has decided to financially support the Lokalize project of KDE.

Recent developments in the OpenChange and KDE open source projects are set to bridge a “missing link” in messaging and groupware compatibility from Microsoft’s Exchange to open source clients.

Many open source groupware suites lay claim to this holy grail of interoperability, but the software to synchronise address book, task and calendar information with Exchange is sold as a proprietary extension.

The long-awaited Pandora open-source handheld has inched one step closer to completion, as the OpenPandora team has put on display the nearly finalized case design. We review what we know about Pandora to date, and what the project is hoping to accomplish.

Igel has announced five new thin clients that run Linux, using Via or AMD processors. The new UD2, UD3, UD5, UD7, and UD9 (left) offer a variety of form factors, as well as “Digital Service Pack” software that can simply thin-client configuration, says the company.

PureWave Networks is using Linux, a Freescale processor, and an off-the-shelf middleware package from Enea to create its next generation of WiMAX base stations. Due later this year, the base stations will aim to bridge the gap between macro and pico WiMAX stations, says the company.

Phones

Just when you thought there are enough not-so-good looking and overrated phones out there, Dell is expected to announce two iPhone and Blackberry competitors sometime next month. Code-named MePhone (hopefully not the final name), the phones will run on Google Android and Microsoft Windows Mobile respectively.

Sub-notebooks

You’re basically trolling through their inventory until you find the one you want, which the $209 model with 4GB of storage and Ubuntu. The first time I picked one and added to cart, some dude apparently grabbed it before me, so I’d check two or three to add to your cart, then just delete the extraneous ones. Then just add the coupon code $C$TXXP1CT3BLC which will knock the price down to $177 for up to two notebooks in your cart.

I admit to being a little gobstopped by Nicholas Negroponte’s announcment in the Guardian that the next generation OLPC will be Open Hardware is a pretty big deal. I picked up the announcement this morning from Make Magazine editor, Phil Torrone’s twitter feed in which he says “This is pretty much the biggest news of 2009″. For the maker, tinkerer, hardware hacker world, this might just be true.

If there is one Web addiction that I have not been able to tame, it’s collecting add-ons for Firefox. I currently have 43 add-ons actively running in my browser, and I have an additional two that I use in Thunderbird.

As a staple of the Web experience, browsers have come a long way. When Firefox began allowing developers to create add-on applications, browser usability was greatly improved.

This morning Adrian Holovaty announced that he will be open sourcing Everyblock. Everyblock is a site that crawls local data sources, aggregates the data, and then surfaces them geographically. For instance I get an email everyday that alerts me to news, fire department activity, health notices and flickr photos taken within blocks of my house.

Business

Will this release actually help unwind the market and return some order to the debt market? Or is this just J.P. Morgan throwing some bad code over the side and hoping for a pat-on-the-back at a time when its credibility is near zero?

The founder, former chairman and chief executive of Business Objects has turned to open source for his latest venture in business intelligence.

Bernard Liautaud has joined the board of open source ETL and data integration specialist Talend following a round of $12m funding by Balderton Capital. Liautaud – a pioneer in BI who helped create an industry with his founding of Business Objects nearly 20 years ago – is a general partner of Balderton, which was an early investor in MySQL.

[O]pen source developers want to find a way to make money from their projects. On the other hand, many application users, particularly enterprise users, are looking for applications with fee-based support. Rightly or wrongly, they feel that paying a fee brings greater accountability, and often these users lack the skills to manage open source apps on their own and would rather pay someone else to do it.

Other Fields

Friedman cites open source software as one of his ‘flatteners,’ a factor or impact that will work to level the competitive playing field on a global basis. Friedman demonstrates a decent understanding of open source, but I wonder what the role and impact of open source practices and strategies of sharing and openness will be within the emergent energy technology industry.

Free and open source software has certainly had a far-reaching and deep impact on enterprise software development and business and arguably on the IT industry as a whole. Will any of the entrants into ET see the potential to take this tool of development and distribution to help spread the next best forms of power generation, distribution and use?

Maths is a famously lonely discipline – I should know, having spent three years of my life grappling with a single equation (the equation won). Mathematicians meet, and collaborate, it’s true; but what would a truly open source approach to the process of solving mathematical problems look like?

After 15 years of development, OO.o3 is feature-rich, functional and quite usable, readers say. “I’ve never found any problems with the usability of OO.o, even going back to the earliest versions,” Barr reports. “It’s always been a serviceable substitute for Microsoft Office, and its feature set gets better with each release. Usability hasn’t suffered as features have been added — if anything, it’s gotten better.”

Meanwhile, yesterday Sun Micrososytems reported its quarterly financial results, and there were strong signs that its open source initiatives are beginning to gain traction, particularly on the MySQL front. In fact, Sun’s latest sales numbers for its MySQL division are making the $1 billion price it paid for the open source database look like a good deal.

Leftovers

I have to admit that I’ve never quite understood the point of any sort of obscenity laws. Perhaps it’s just my inner-libertarian, but why should the government be outlawing what people look at — especially when it comes to such a subjective standard as “obscenity.” Over in the UK, many people are up in arms over a new pornography law that is so broad and so vague that it could outlaw certain Batman comics, among other things.

Most importantly, beyond vague talk of “changing the rules” it says little about redefining *precisely* what people should be allowed to do with that stuff freely – for example, by setting down in law new fair uses such as being able to take back-up copies of any digital content, use in quotations, parody etc.

At the moment, most people ignore the letter of the law, because the law is totally outdated, and the law generally turns a blind eye to them doing it, because it would be hard to arrest most of the country’s youth, but that’s hardly a solution in the long term.

Users on the Gears of War official forums are reporting that the digital certificates for the game have expired, as of 28th January 2009. This means that the game will not launch at a system date post-28th Jan. Obviously, this is awful news for those people who enjoy playing the game on the PC, since unless they keep their system date before the 28th, they cannot play the game.

I’m somewhat concerned to learn that the RIAA may be enlisting broadband providers, such as AT&T and Comcast, to police their networks for content theft. While I don’t condone software or media piracy, I’m uncomfortable with Comcast tracking my every move online. Especially given their apparent inability to keep their records straight. As John Aprigliano discovered when Comcast misidentified him as a movie pirate:

Waiting in my snail mail box for me was an unassuming letter from your favorite cable provider, and mine, Comcast. Contained in this letter was information pertaining to an alleged torrent download called “Cadillac Records.” I have come to learn that “Cadillac Records” is a movie with Adrien Brody and that their marketing for this movie must have really sucked because with what ever thousands or millions of dollars they used to promote this movie, I have never heard of it

We’ve heard cases like these before, where customers are assumed guilty until proven innocent.

Late last year, Canada Post and the Public Service Alliance of Canada became embroiled in a heated strike action over sick pay benefits. In the midst of the dispute, several PSAC members took direct aim at Canada Post CEO Moya Greene, recording a short parody video titled “The Greench.” The video, which was posted on YouTube, adapted the well-known Dr. Seuss tune “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” to criticize Greene and the company. While the creation of a protest video is not particularly noteworthy, what followed soon after is. Just as the video began to attract some attention, YouTube removed it after receiving a complaint from Canada Post alleging that the video violated the company’s copyright.

Politicians in general are not terribly tech-savvy, let alone conscious of the most important intellectual freedom issues, but President Barack Obama does have a reputation of being more aware than most of the new media and new possibilities of the internet. The new US presidential website shows some promise that indeed, we now have a US president who isn’t afraid of the future.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

John William Templeton looks at Free Open Source Software and African American culture and innovation 09 (2004)

IN previous E-mails that reveal Microsoft’s fight against Linux at Intel, Bill Gates called it a "Jihad". This is a furious battle that Microsoft secretly had going against Intel’s support for Linux. This was so secret that Microsoft executives even abstained from telling their peers about it. “Please keep confidential. this is a nightmare…,” wrote Bill Veghte for example. There was great caution there because someone could lose a job over the mischief (leak), which Brian Valentine was eventually allowed to know about.

Let’s take this one small step at a time and handle this chronologically using the 3 exhibits we have at hand (full texts appended at the bottom). We start with Exhibit px06782 (June-July 2000)[PDF].

Joachim Kempin writes to people up at the top, namely Bill Gates and David Heiner. He states that:

As I mentioned at the retreat we have a huge problem with Intel going against us with Linux.

This is said in reference to the news that Intel is investing $100,000,000 in development that involves Linux.

This issue was not brought up by Joachim Kempin (OEM chief) however. It also involved familiar names like Steve Ballmer and Bill Veghte. This exhibit, while heavily redacted (what’s so confidential that it must be hidden from the courts?), does show Bill Veghte’s nervousness where he says:

Please keep confidential. this is a nightmare…

This whole thing came through Bill Veghte who spotted a CNET article. Tom Phillips, who reported to Veghte (probably his boss) and Kim Akers from the Windows team, writes:

Yes, but we need to be incredibly sensitive with this data. It was disclosed with extreme
concern. If Mary finds out that we know, someone will loose their job at Compaq who is
very helpful to MSFT.

Who is Mary? And who is that someone from Compaq (now part of H-P) who is “very helpful to MSFT”? Does Microsoft have ‘insiders’ in other companies? Companies that are intended — at least by their very nature — to focus mostly on hardware and remain impartial with only their own goals in mind? Is Compaq trying to accomplish the same things as Microsoft? The current collusion with Intel is a crime which Microsoft might be forced to pay billions in remedy for. At a later stage, we will present detailed antitrust evidence about Compaq and Microsoft.

Anyway, why would someone “lose their job”? It sure smells like some form of violation of ethics, if not a violation of the law.

It is explained a little earlier (by Tom Phillips) that:

According to Compaq insiders, the money is targeted at Enterprise and ISP/ASP Sun systems, where Intel will provide a stipend to Compaq $20MM for the efforts necessary to insure that these are Linux based IA32 (and eventually IA64) based sales. Compaq stated that it would rather vector the business to Windows, but that was not an option with Intel.

So Intel insists against Windows (we saw this before). Microsoft feels as though it needs to respond or retaliate.

We do have some damage control to do with them and we are going to have to work hard to change the direction they are going down particularly in sw investments around Linux.

So a whole team from Microsoft flew all the way to ensure that Linux receives no investments? Well, since Jim Allchin sees a "huge threat" in Linux and feels "scared" of it, maybe all of this is predictable.

Here is the bit about Intel and Linux:

As a sidenote, I probed hard with John on how hard Intel was pushing Linux in general. I came away pretty convinced that these are not the guys that I was hitting with our OEMs here and the Far East (Bill/Steveb: if you have not read the piece of mail BrianV sent you last week on Intel and Linux, please do so). John’s guys are focused on the networking and telecommunications space and these were not companies or groups that I have been talking with. My bet is that it is coming from Mike Fister’s org.

In this message, for the uninitiated, “Bill” is Bill Gates, “Steveb” is Steve Ballmer and “BrianV” is Brian Valentine, who is now doing his damage from inside Amazon [1, 2]. He also corrupted analysts for anti-Linux studies.

Here is another bit about Linux where Tom Phillips is assigned to handle it.

We have the model in place based on our design wins at Dell and Compaq and in my opinion, we should be just as aggressive on price as we were with Dell. The two other appliance efforts that we will engage on are small business server (I talked at a conceptual level about Central service and Intel, with the WEN product and they liked the idea) and provisioning server. They were particularly enthusiastic about the provisioning server. We should engage in dialog but this will be a lively internal debate about whether we move to an appliance solution/strategy for this. This group is where there Linux Investment Is heaviest In my opinion and can cause us the most pain. TomPh will take the lead here.

More on Linux here:

–> Network devices group: Most of their stuff is on VXWorks today. They are doing some stuff in Linux and looking at Win2k. We need to accelerate this evaluation and where appropriate get them on board if there is real business here They aren’t particularly happy with vxworks so we should also think about them on WinCE with an aggressive source license.

This whole message was sent in reply to “Intel call – Paul Ottelini”. The message is omitted from the exhibit (“Privileged”), but this was sent from Bill Gates to Neil Calvin, Mike Porter, Robbie Bach, Brian Valentine, Bill Veghte, Bob McBreen. Copies were also sent to Kate Sako, Dan Crouse, Steve Ballmer, Joachim Kempin, Paul Maritzm, Eric Rudder, Bill Neukom, and Carl Stark.

Finally, we have this third exhibit, Exhibit px03112 (August 2000)[PDF]. It’s about Intel and it was sent from Joachim Kempin to Bill Gates. It’s utterly disgusting, but then again, Joachim Kempin was arrested for illegally shooting (and killing) antelopes for leisure, so phrases like “I am thinking of putting hitting the OEM harder than in the past with anti Linux actions” are by no means surprising. One person who used to work for Joachim Kempin told me about his strong accent and very hard stance, indicating that this is an unpleasant person. Anyway, here is his message to Bill Gates, in full (exhibit as a whole in Appendix C).

I have been trying to gather some background info. The more I dig in it becomes clear that Intel is connecting with all the UNIX groups inside the large OEMs who are not MS friendly in the first place and are encouraging them to go to Linux-which they call a unified UNIX(which seems stupid even to me)
they throw promotional funds at them to develop new devices based on this OS and are encouraging Itanium work by asking the OEMs to adopt their own apps(middle ware) and encourage some of their key ISVs to do so.
Some of the money is INTEL inside money- the just go beyond the normal rates or qualify Linux adds under the same scheme.
Some OEMs are telling me that the total outlay for Intel is between 100-200M$ year-but there is no hard data for the total amount. Siemens told me they were offered 5-6M$ for this 6 months ago and I know that they funded a netdevice in NEC and made approx. 10M$ available.
I have been sending for some time mail with this info and mentioned it during our exec retreat. The hard part is the answer- in one way we are married to them on the other hand they are destroying the basis for the marriage. To play this the hard way would prob cause more damage than we need and get more attention than we need. On the OEM side I am thinking of putting hitting the OEM harder than in the past with anti Linux actions, in addition I will stop any go-to-market activities with Intel and only work with their competitors (something which is easy to do because they normally put crazy demands on us).

Is that not extortion or blackmail? They pressure Intel with some sort of an embargo — the ransom being that they drop Linux. They use companies like AMD as a bargaining card against software competitors. On it carries:

For the rest of the company this is harder. I have been complaining that we have no real Linux watch-dog group in MS, a lot of people have some ideas and actions around this but nobody is really responsible- I will establish this for OEM, may be we should do it for the company as well.

I do not think you can do more than explaining what that Linux is bad for Intel, let’s leave it there and do as they do- work underground with the clear understanding to promote and advantage the guys with less market share without declaring our strategy.
I would further try to restrict source code deliveries where possible and be less gracious when interpreting agreements- again without being obvious about it. The last thing we need need is them shutting us down- so this will have to be a delicate dance. But openess with them and sharing our real plans should not longer be done- they are not doing it either.

Sorry, Joachim. “Sharing our real plans” is now done. It’s out there for people to see the behaviour you engage in with Bill Gates’ endorsement. █

Jeff Jones Output Needs to be Embargoed

LIES AND LIES AND LIES just carry on coming from Microsoft's Jeff Jones. While deleting legitimate comments that he does not like (including mine) from his blog, he’s pushing — on behalf of his employer — bogus statistics that they deliberately ‘massage’ in order to daemonise Firefox and glorify Internet Explorer (with ActiveX and other competition- and security-hostile add-ons). Way to go, censorship!

In analysis published on his Technet Security Blog and at cio.com, Jeff picked apart research I conducted in 2007, which found that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser was unsafe for 284 days in 2006.

According to Jones’s analysis, Firefox users were instead more “at risk” than their IE counterparts in 2006 — albeit just by a single day — 285 days in 2006, he concludes.

What Jones neglected to mention was that in my analysis I only examined the longevity of unpatched browser vulnerabilities that by each company’s definition earned the most dangerous security ratings.

In addition to being a Big Lie, these fake numbers conveniently tend to confuse “Firefox” with “Firefox on Windows”. Many of the flaws are inherent in the platform, not the Web browser alone.

“In one piece of mail people were suggesting that Office had to work equally well with all browsers and that we shouldn’t force Office users to use our browser. This Is wrong and I wanted to correct this. [...] Another suggestion In this mail was that we can’t make our own unilateral extensions to HTML I was going to say this was wrong and correct this also.”

Spyware-Soft?

Internet Explorer suffers from other deficiencies, general characteristics or problems that are user hostile. Internet Explorer 7 was already spying (eavesdropping) on people’s surfing habits by default and since it is installed and cannot be removed from Windows, it makes Windows nothing less than spyware, by the very conservative definition of the word. According to this report from The Register, Internet Explorer 8 makes it even worse. It compares what Microsoft is doing to deep packet inspection, which was implicitly ruled illegal by the EU Commission.

Privacy activists are crying foul over the “Suggested Sites” feature in IE8, but Microsoft insists concerns about the feature, such that it might be used to serve up targeted advertising or that it poses a security risk, are misplaced.

Digital Britain: A tax, a quango and ISP snooping

Did anyone expect more from Stephen Carter CBE? The former Ofcom boss and No.10 strategy chief (sic) has spent his career moving between the world of advertising and public relations, quangos and party. So it’s no surprise that the “vision thing” involves a tax, a quango and a burden by private parties to snoop on the public. It’s an administrator’s answer.

This might explain why the British government is so deep in the pockets of Microsoft, as we have shown time and time again [1, 2]. They think alike.

Government and Microsoft in Bed

The Opera complaint is taking its toll, but it has no effect in the country where Microsoft operates from. People like Richard Stallman treat the US Department of Justice like it’s a joke (RMS puts scare quotes around “Justice”) and they have many valid reasons to [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. In fact, it has become rather conventional to say that the USDOJ is simply riddled with corruption, much like the FTC and even like the FCC. It is therefore not surprising that, according to this report from Dow Jones, the USDOJ is not willing to properly intervene, despite all the pressure that constantly arrives from the EU. Why can’t a national authority take appropriate action against reckless/rogue companies within its own borders but instead rely on justice that’s enforced or restored from overseas?

Federal and state antitrust regulators involved in a long-running settlement with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) told a federal judge Wednesday that they could not yet say if they will ask for court oversight of the software giant to extend beyond this year.

Microsoft, meanwhile, assured U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington, D.C., that none of its recent announced layoffs will reduce the number of employees working to satisfy the company’s antitrust obligations.

A bad soap opera?

[...]

A trial against Microsoft on any particular point of its monopoly (and for that matter, on any corporation perverting the market because of its illegitimate monopolistic position) essentially conveys the message that regardless of the possible sanction against the company, its wrongdoings are not morally tolerable anymore. Were it only because of this last point, I still do find that that legal actions are sometimes justified.

Obama Fights Windows

The worm spreads via USB drive, using the Windows autorun feature to install itself automatically on any drive it connects with. Unlike most of today’s profit-driven malware, the Obama worm doesn’t steal your credit card number or turn your PC into a remote-controlled zombie system. In fact, it isn’t designed to do anything besides float a small picture of Obama at the bottom right corner of your desktop all day every Monday.

The botnet-powered assault was accompanied by blackmail demands posted on the site’s forum through compromised zombie machines. These threatening messages claimed the site was been carpetbombed with spurious traffic generated through a 9,000 strong botnet of compromised machines.

“While Microsoft can support GPL-based code through its partners, as it does with Novell, the company can’t contribute directly to projects due to the GPL’s license terms and requirements, he [Ramji] explained.”

As Microsoft's Jim Allchin put it, “GPL is the licensing model. We think it’s very bad for — on an education, telling the world why we think it’s bad. We don’t think it’s the same as public domain. Somebody wants to put in a free DSB, we don’t have a problem with that, at least on licensing. But GPL, we think it’s very bad basically for the world, but especially for the United States.”

“Why does Microsoft vehemently hate Freedom?”This was not the only time that Allchin described the GPL as anti-American. It’s just so much easier to combat basic freedoms by describing them as demons, calling them a “threat” and — in Allchin’s case — inciting US ” policymakers” against this “threat” (GPL), to use his own words.

Why does Microsoft vehemently hate Freedom? Enough to fight it even? As we’ve demonstrated before, thanks to antitrust evidence, Microsoft employees are trained (indoctrinated) to believe that “[they're] the Good Guys!” The same techniques are routinely used to maintain war atmosphere (as in "evangelism is WAR!" or “Jihad” [1, 2, 3]) and instill aggression in troops’ minds.

Meanwhile, Novell and friends are poisoning GNU/Linux with Microsoft technologies. They use “GPL” as a moral disguise that Microsoft won’t intervene with. █

Transmeta patents trolled, company dies

[...]

Intellectual Ventures (IFV), a patent troll invention company, headed by ex-Vole Nathan Myhrvold, who had tried to score some patents from Transmeta in May 2008, got a secret deal going with Novafora and Transmeta’s board.

[...]

The Transmeta board finished off its merger, quit its job (ironically as part of the deal no Transmeta board member will serve on the Novafora board) and still found time to sell off 140+ of its patents to Intellectual Ventures.

In the future, we intend to expose more of Nathan and Cameron Myhrvold’s participation in crimes inside Microsoft. There is plenty of them among antitrust evidence (we are in the process of classifying and sorting about 300 additional exhibits). Cameron Myhrvold, who is Nathan’s brother, is still keeping close to Microsoft. They both seem to be serving the company from the outside. █